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Truck Festival celebrates its eleventh birthday this weekend with another two-day event at Hill Farm, Steventon, Oxfordshire. Well-established as one of the country’s greatest small-scale festivals – well, it’s small compared to the likes of Reading and Glastonbury – Truck this year hosts The Lemonheads, These New Puritans, Maps, This Town Needs Guns, Johnny Foreigner, Lovvers, Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly, Munch Munch, Rolo Tomassi, Youthmovies, Television Personalities, Daedelus, Laura Marling and many more. It’s basically DiS in a field – a whole lot of our favourites, with tasty beer served by locals and cake to soak it up.
Truck founder Robin Bennett here answers our questions, ahead of DiS’s five must-see acts playing this year’s Truck. Oh, and don’t forget to check out DiS DJs, too. Which is me, basically, playing some glitchy electro. Early on Sunday morning. Fun times.
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Hi Truck - please introduce who you are and what your background is, prior to launching Truck way back when.
My name is Robin Bennett, festival instigator. I asked a local farmer if me and a few friends could have a bit of a party in his field, and now here we are. I was studying English at university before Truck ‘98 but after all the fun it was too hard to go back to libraries, so I never did. There’s nothing wrong with libraries, though.
Truck's now in its eleventh year - looking back to the first one, could you ever have imagined the festival still 'trucking' so long later?
Probably not, if we're honest. But we certainly expected it to amount to something special right from the start.
*It must be really pleasing to see the festival continue to succeed what with the increasing competition - as the years have passed, has it been harder or easier pulling Truck together? *
Like anything, there are years when everything is easy and others when everything is nigh on impossible. Especially last year, with the floods! As a result we have reinvented a lot of things this year which has been fun. It's easy to get stuck doing the same thing.
Truck is celebrated as a festival that does what it does really well without over-stretching itself - does the scale of the event ever limit your ambitions for it, or would any expansion not be in keeping with the spirit of Truck?**
I think there is a way to expand horizons without just increasing the size. There is something appealing to humans about the scale and size of Truck, plus there are natural limits in the way Hill Farm is laid out. Our new festival, Wood, in May was even smaller! But the Truck spirit has limitless applications, of course. It's about doing things regardless. As it happens we have increased the capacity a bit this year (by about ten per cent) and have sold more tickets than ever before.
You've The Lemonheads as a headliner doing It's A Shame About Ray - I take it you were fans of the album? It's quite the coup - do you know of anyone coming from really far afield for the set?
All of us are fans of the LP - I used to have a live bootleg of it. Can't wait! I don't know of any particular long journeys, but no doubt there will be some. It was a brainwave from Genevieve in our office and we all immediately thought,_ YES_!
Who else on the bill are you really excited about? Obviously everyone is playing for a reason, but there must be acts playing that you're going to drop everything to see.
So many - given that I usually see a maximum of three bands. Okkervil River are great live. Altern 8 in boilersuits will be fun. And TBC is always good... my dear producer James Rutledge will be DJing some of his fantastic remixes in our new stage, the Beat-Hive. I've a feeling that will be my favourite stage, with Daedelus and YACHT also appearing (and the DiS DJs!).
What festivals do you see as peer-level events, and are there any that have sprung up, in your opinion, as a result of Truck influencing them?
I think we were one of the first of the current wave - but we certainly didn't invent the concept of festivals! Green Man seems to be in the same authentic spirit. I feel quite kindred with Cropredy, funnily enough, and we can't ignore Glasto, it is the original independent festival! (Okay, not totally independent anymore.) There are many festivals that have imitated these kinds of events, some even admit to it. I think the ones I mentioned are different because the organisers are music people first, business second. I think some of the recent debacles have reminded folks that a real festival is more than a line-up in a field.
Truck is DiS-sponsored – is it fair to say that a lot of the bands playing have received favourable press on DiS? What do you look at when building a bill - do you look at reviews, or do you follow your gut via MySpace sites and the like?
If I was to listen to every band that contacted us, my brain would be awash with an infinite musical slurry. I think music fans tend to like about ten things at a time so I think it's better to have ten or 20 people asking artists they really like. That's how we've done it this year. Tempting as it may be to read reviews and count MySpace friends, the best bet is a collection of bands that some opinionated people really love. As the chances are others will too. Having said that, DiS is always my first port of call to find out about something I don't know about. I think, like Truck, it was set up to provide something that was lacking in the mainstream, and both help people to discover new music. Several of our stage organisers, like Vacuous Pop and Sonic Cathedral, are regulars on your message boards!
** Most festivals are already thinking of next year before this year's events - do you already have ideas for 2009, or any dream headliners that perhaps you haven't - as yet - been able to get?**
Of course! But we rarely plan that far ahead... one year, we will actually manage to book those bands that are always rumoured (Flaming Lips, Radiohead). Maybe next year?!
Finally, what should a Truck virgin expect from the event, and what should they do to get the very most out of the two days?
Six bands simultaneously for 48 hours, cheap and cheerful food served by farmers, more people (stewards) dressed in orange than a Holland football match, and music lurching rapidly from Okkervil River to Altern 8. To get the most out of it, drink a moderate but consistent amount of cider throughout the weekend.
A limited amount of festival tickets are available until Friday (July 18) morning, from the festival’s official website.
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Johnny Foreigner
Be fair: like we wouldn’t want to highlight JoFo’s appearance at this year’s Truck, given our mouth-agape (and dribbling) love of them to date. While DiS is sure most attendees, or at least those who frequent these pages, will have had the Birmingham three-piece’s gleefully dizzying indie rock rattle their skulls in the recent past (their album is finally out, after all), newcomers can use the festival format to dip in and out of the band’s successfully tested take on wobbly pop riffs and fret-mangling aggression. Don’t like what you hear? You’re dead to us. No, _no_… just kidding. Aren’t we?
Daedelus
Ninja Tune-signed solo artist Daedelus, otherwise known as Los Angeles native Alfred Darlington, is among our choices of a dance music nature at this year’s Truck – his recently released Love To Make Music To album (review) is an office favourite, especially the War Games-sampling banger ‘Hrs:Mins:Secs_’, which we’re likely to go absolutely ballistic to when it’s dropped. Think hip-hop cut and pasted beside the sweetest pop and retro-hued rave beats, a collage of spiky sounds so insistently engaging it’s impossible to keep a foot still, and a sense of fun that’s unbeatable. Yep, we’re excited.
Munch Munch
Bristol-based and baby-faced outfit Munch Munch – they look like school’s fresher-than-fresh in their memories – mix up Animal Collective influences with wickedly addictive melodies that saw their ‘Wedding’ single of last year make it to Single of the Week status on DiS. Never ones to stick to a formula, with one song never like the last beyond the most basic echoes of familiarity (as is natural given it’s the same band up there), Munch Munch are an absorbing live attraction who are building a decent buzz, sizeable enough to see them into 2009 as ones to watch properly.
These New Puritans
Another band DiS has followed closely for some time, and alongside Johnny Foreigner one of our tips for 2008 back in January, These New Puritans create the sort of divisive, highly-literate art-rock that only ever seems to come from acts bound for a sort of greatness. Their debut album Beat Pyramid (review), released in January, made good on a degree of the foursome’s promise, but we’re of the opinion there’s a lot more to the band that’s yet to reveal itself. Truck might not be the place where these additional dimensions become apparent, but even if they play a relative by-numbers set on the day TNP will be one of the standout acts of the weekend. Miss and suffer your friends telling you, over and over, about how great they were and how you were a sucker for watching anything else.
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Laura Marling
Because you can’t listen to ear-bleeding music all your life, and Truck recognises the need for breathers. Appearing alongside a number of other folk-tinged acts at the festival, Laura Marling adapts the typical acoustic singer-songwriting formula by lacing her delicate songs with an emotional weight uncommon in the work of the young – yes, you’ve read it enough times already, but the Reading native really is only 18 years old. To say she has potential is slightly misleading – as debut album Alas I Cannot Swim (review) demonstrates, she’s already realising what ability she has at her disposal. So, join Marling at Truck for something more subdued that everything else profiled above, sup a cool one and drift away somewhere pleasant.
A limited amount of festival tickets are available until Friday (July 18) morning, from the festival’s official website.
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So that’s us all moist about Truck 2008 – let’s just hope the weather doesn’t take a turn for the unbelievably nasty and wash the thing out again… No, seriously, it’d better not. DiS doesn’t have any wellies. See you there? Who are you excited about seeing? Buy us a drink, yeah? Yeah!
